


in all your darkest hours

by sapphicish



Series: take something beautiful, then go and smash it [2]
Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Hallucinations, Season 2, Spoilers, the usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-03 22:23:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14006112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: “Que sera, sera,” Alisa says. Jessica shoots her a look, which she takes as permission to continue when it is decidedlynotanything of the sort – “Whatever will be will be.” She hums a bit of the song.“Shut up,” Jessica says, and throws a pillow at her face.





	in all your darkest hours

**Author's Note:**

> a sequel to oh but honey...i guess?  
> i just feel a lot about these two, i guess, and i need to get it out SOMEHOW

Jessica wakes with a start; the way you wake up when you dream that you're falling or tripping or _jumping_ and you wake up _because_ of the fall. It's like that, her stomach dropping low and her heart racing, and she stares into the darkness for what feels like a long, long time, blinking and breathing.

“Bad dream, Jessie?” This Alisa says it like that Alisa had said _do you miss me, Jessie?_ Do you miss me, Jessie? Bad – dream – Jessie?

Slow and soft and kind, and not real, never real, and Jessica wants to claw herself out of her own skin.

Instead, she turns over onto her back and stares into the darkness overhead, watches the dark figure by the bed shift and blur in the corner of her vision. “Yeah,” she says; then, “I don't know,” she says, and that feels more honest.

“Remember what I told you?”

“You tell me a lot of shit,” Jessica intones. “A lot of bullshit, mostly. What do you mean?”

“You're mine,” her mother whispers. Jessica blinks; purple and blue blur in her vision, lights flickering, and her breathing slows. The lights all tunnel out to one; orange, shining in dimly through the blinds, through the window, from darkness to darkness. “And I'm yours.”

“Doesn't ring a bell,” Jessica says; lies.

Alisa touches her hair. Jessica slaps her hand away. “Yeah, it does.”

Jessica pulls her knees up, then drops them and turns onto her side, tucks her hands beneath a cheek, stares up at the curly-haired woman looming above her, outlined in shadow and that orange-gold light. “When are you going to leave me alone?”

“When you want me to.”

“I want you to.”

“No,” Alisa says it matter-of-factly, smiling – smiling, always goddamn smiling and Jessica has a brief moment where she wants to slap it off her face, then she reminds herself – this is a hallucination, a delusion, an illusion, whatever anyone wants to call it that doubles for a word meaning _not real, just in your head, because you're going insane._ “You don't.”

Jessica closes her eyes, wishes she could feel – nothing. Wishes she could _stop fucking feeling._ Wishes she could pull this feeling out of her chest – just reach her hands down her throat and pull until there was nothing left, and then maybe this particular delusion would be gone, and then maybe the ache in her chest would leave, and then maybe.

Jessica reaches for the bottle, twists it open and takes a swig, breathes in the way it singes her throat. Her mother leans in, grinning a little, wry and quiet. “Hand it over.”

Jessica looks at her, looks at this thing that is taking up all her life and eating everything away and suffocating her bit by bit, thinks about how there will be nothing left of her in the end or so it feels like now, thinks of following through with _birchstreethigginsdrivecobaltlane_ and –

Passes the bottle over, flops back to the bed and squeezes her eyes shut again. “Why not,” she tells the air, the space around her. Yeah. _Why not._

“Que sera, sera,” Alisa says. Jessica shoots her a look, which she takes as permission to continue when it is decidedly _not_ anything of the sort – “Whatever will be will be.” She hums a bit of the song.

“Shut up,” Jessica says, and throws a pillow at her face.

-

“Don't you know _any_ other song?”

She's playing the piano again. Jessica doesn't know when or how or why she got a piano moved into her apartment – it would never fit through the goddamn door, for one, but it's there and it's been there since she can't remember and doesn't care to. Maybe, for all she knows, it's another goddamn hallucination – it wouldn't surprise her. Maybe the silk sheets her mother made her get (something about _just because you want to reject your suburban roots doesn't mean you can't have some sheets that don't feel like shit and look like shit,_ so of course Jessica goes out and gets the sheets but does she really, is this all in her head – well, that's the real question, the real kick in the teeth, and she still doesn't have an answer so the kicks keep coming) are a hallucination, too.

That wouldn't surprise her, either. At this point, nothing does, and maybe nothing ever will again, but life has been a lot of 'maybes' lately. Jessica is laying on the couch, staring at a stain on the ceiling, listening to the last strains of _Ain't We Got Fun_ for the thousandth time since her mom 'moved in', and it's exhausting but somehow not as exhausting as she thought it would be.

But still pretty damn exhausting, and still pretty fucking _annoying._

“Why?” There's an amused note in Alisa's voice. “Do you want to hear something else?”

“Yeah,” Jessica says dryly, thinks about how the stain on the ceiling looks like Antarctica. Weird. “Yeah, I'd say after listening to you play that once a day for a week straight makes me want to hear something else.”

“What, Nirvana? Linkin Park? Metallica?”

“You know I'm not fourteen years old again, right?”

“...So. Metallica?”

Jessica holds a middle finger up, listens to her mom's endless laughter, thinks _well, at least she stopped playing._ “Dick.”

“Don't talk to your mother like that. A month, by the way.”

“What?”

“It's been a month.”

Jessica squints at the ceiling, feels the vague amusement inside of her die away. “No, it's been...” She counts briefly on her fingers, then has a jolt of cold realization; she doesn't know what day it is. Or what month.

“A month,” Alisa says, comes to sit with her on the couch and pull her close, warm and light but somehow suffocating all at once, and Jessica sucks in air through her teeth.

“No it hasn't,” she tries, reaches to grab her phone. She doesn't know how long it's been since she checked it – she's had jobs, sure, clients who want her to threaten a stalker or threaten someone who won't pay their rent or threaten someone who stepped on their dog's tail once in middle school, but she hasn't had calls.

But she has. Twenty-eight. Eight from _her._ Countless more from Jeri. Some unknown trash numbers. Someone named 'Kara', and she doesn't know who that is and doesn't really give a shit, probably some forgettable client. And texts. Lots and lots of texts. None from Oscar – she knows for a fact that she's been visiting him, or else she's dreamed up dozens of visions of doing so and that's a little desperate even for her. Jessica stares at the glow of the phone for another few minutes, listening to Alisa's absentminded humming.

She scrolls through the texts from Jeri, not really reading any of them. Thinks, briefly, of texting her back. Saying _sorry, I was busy._ Busy for a whole month. Yeah. Right.

Jessica tosses the phone aside to the other end of the couch, skin crawling. “Whatever,” she says.

Yeah. _Whatever._ Whatever; it's just my life falling apart because the ghost of Alisa Jones won't leave me alone, and she isn't even a ghost, I'm just hallucinating my dead mother, because that's normal. Whatever, it's not like I have that life to live. Whatever, it's not like I can't even pay attention when I'm ordering pizza on the phone because my dead mother is constantly lurking over my shoulder saying _pineapple DOES belong on pizza and so help me Jessica if you don't order pineapple you aren't even my daughter anymore_ and somehow there it is, two pineapple and mushroom pizzas arriving at the door like anyone's actually heard of such a revolting combination—

“Whatever,” Alisa echoes. She sounds amused; it half-makes Jessica's skin crawl, half-makes her want to smile. She doesn't smile. "You're sounding like your teenage self again. It was always 'whatever, whatever, whatever'."

“Yeah,” Jessica says dully. Remembers, for a moment. Then she shakes her head, reaches for her laptop and sinks into work, into documents about someone whose case she doesn't even remember taking, wonders if this is what it feels like to go nuts. And of course it is, because it's a feeling she's had countless times before; a little like falling and a lot like landing all the way at the bottom with dozens of broken bones and a rattled brain.

When she looks up again an hour later, her mother's gone, but Jessica knows that she'll come back.

She always does.

-

_She's on a ferris wheel. Playland. The lights are bright and sparkling, and so is the sun above them; it's radiant and warm, not like the cold night her mother had been shot in the head; not like it at all, and Alisa is sitting beside her, their hands tangled together. It's broad daylight, but no one else is around; no one else is in the gondolas to the front and back of them, no children laughing and screaming. Nothing._

_Alisa is staring at her. “Do you miss me, Jessie?”_

_Jessica snorts. “Don't be stupid,” she says, looking down and feeling the thrill rushing through her – they're so high up that she almost feels like she can touch the clouds. That's power. This is power. Just them, just here, just now. “You're right here.”_

_“I know,” Alisa says. “But I won't be forever.”_

_“Yeah? Where are you planning to go, then, asshole?”_

_“I don't know. Anywhere.”_

_“Good plan,” Jessica drones, listens to the screaming of sirens in the distance._

_“Maybe Montevideo,” Alisa says._

_“I thought that was Karl's place.”_

_“It can be ours, too.” Alisa looks at her. “Karl didn't have a monopoly on Uruguay. He didn't have a monopoly on anything.”_

_“We don't have a place. We're not going to have a_ place. _”_

_“This is our place. Remember?”_

_“I don't want to.” It's the first honest thing that she's said and really, truly meant since forever, and Alisa smiles at her like she's done something good, like that biting truth was_ good. __

_“You don't have to, then, if you don't want to. But you know it's true. This is ours. All of it.”_

_“They're coming, you know.”_

_“I know.”_

_Jessica slides their fingers together. The sirens match the rhythm of her heartbeat pounding unusually quick in her chest. Maybe she thinks that's odd, and maybe she doesn't give a shit, and she's leaning toward the latter right about now. “Let's go, then,” she says._

_Alisa helps her up onto the gondola seat, follows her, rising in her stupid white sweater and baggy jeans and curly hair, squeezes her hand tight enough that Jessica thinks briefly about circulation before realizing that she doesn't care, doesn't mind at all, can only look down at the ground stretching far above them and feel free._

_“Will you miss me, Jessie?”_

_Jessica looks at her, takes in her eyes and the look in her eyes, her hair, her sweater. Alisa's lips curl, flashing teeth in an uninhibited grin. “Will you miss_ me? _”_

_They jump._

**Author's Note:**

> alisa is ABSOLUTELY pro-pineapple on pizza and weird combos and jessica is COMPLETELY anti-pineapple on pizza and if you disagree hmu so we can Fight


End file.
